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Uncomfortable Truth

We send our young computer scientists and software engineers out into the world thinking the ACM Code of Ethics protects them. It does not.

This book confronts an uncomfortable truth: the corporate world our graduates enter has deliberately stripped itself of ethical guardrails. Through a combination of personal experience and careful historical analysis, we trace how this happened, and what it means for you.

What You Will Learn

How Milton Friedman and Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen dismantled the mid-century view that CEOs should have an enlightened social conscience, replacing it with amoral shareholder value maximization
Why the power imbalance between early-career employees and Big Tech titans is not an accident, and why it disproportionately affects women and persons of color
What the military's Return With Honor framework teaches us about surviving situations where the rules are stacked against us, without becoming corrupted ourselves

The Author's Unusual Qualification

The author completed full SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training at the Air Force Academy in the summer of 1976, with training freshly updated based on the just-closed Vietnam Prisoner of War experience. That training addressed surviving illegal treatment under the Geneva Conventions through a framework of personal integrity and mutual support.

Decades later, working in high-performance computing, the author recognized something familiar: employees facing an amoral power structure with no enforceable ethical standards to protect them.

A Work in Progress

This book currently presents two chapters as urgently important background material. The solution is not to fix the power imbalance. The solution is to develop skills, on a personal level, to survive that imbalance and remain intact. That work continues.

The Two HPC Tradecraft Series

What is \"HPC tradecraft\" as I know it? This is high-performance computing (HPC) arising from signals intelligence (code breaking) needs. My particular lineage begins with the \"Tunny\" code breaking project at Bletchley Park during World War II. That produced such an odd-looking contraption that the \"Wrens\" operating it named it the Heath Robinson. W. Heath Robinson was a cartoonist known for portraying fantastically complex machines designed to accomplish simple tasks.

Thus the high-performance tradecraft I learned within Cray Research already had a 40-year history. Perhaps because so much was classified Top Secret, we never wrote down how we did things. Institutional knowledge was passed from person to person as mentorship, collaboration, and informal apprenticeship.

I created two book series to teach you HPC tradecraft.

If you are interested in learning HPC tradecraft, I invite you to begin with the first book HPC Tradecraft for Computer Scientists: What We Stopped Teaching.

If you are here for ethics when the stakes are unexpectedly high (either as teacher/mentor or student/early-career), start here with High-Stakes Ethics and continue through Unexpected Histories.

HPC Tradecraft Apprenticeship, three books, is the institutional tradecraft as I learned and practiced, and still practice. Tradecraft is useless unless replicable. The first book teaches my replication method; the second teaches how we accomplished what we did; the third teaches systems thinking, with close observation and characterization of HPC systems under load, using modern AI as the example. The three books are transmission protocol; HPC design; HPC operations.
The HPC Tradecraft Master Practitioner, three books, is the author letting loose and having fun, expressing his mastery of HPC tradecraft. High-Stakes Ethics prepares for the insurmountable power imbalance of a new graduate in the amoral corporate environment. Unexpected Histories demonstrates debugging skills applied outside computer science, showing their value and timeless nature. Constraint-Based Design demonstrates 1986 tradecraft directly applies to modern AI transformer design and usage.

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